A pair of Rivian employees driving a stock R1T won this year’s Rebelle Rally, the women-only 1,600-mile off-road course where GPS navigation is forbidden. This is the first time in the history of the event that an all-electric vehicle won in the 4×4 class, which is the main category of the competition, followed by the X-Cross where crossovers like the Ford Bronco Sport and Ford Mustang Mach-E also entered.
With Lillian Macaruso behind the wheel of the winning Rivian and Alexandra Anderson in the co-driver’s seat, the team – nicknamed “Limestone Legends” because of the Limestone-colored pickup – gathered 1,395 points, or 88 percent of the available points. The car that finished in second place, a 2024 Jeep Wrangler Rubicon 4xe, got 1,359 points. A 2022 Ford Bronco Raptor finished third, collecting 1,301 points, so the all-electric team was in pretty good company at the end of the weeklong off-road navigation rally. The Rebelle Rally is said to be the longest off-road rally in the United States, running across more than 1,500 miles through the Nevada and California desert.
Last year, the same team finished fourth out of 45 and scored the “Rookie of the Year Award,” so it’s safe to say that the girls had their sights set on winning the competition on their second attempt.
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Macaruso is a Special Projects Engineer at Rivian and last year managed to change a tire in four minutes flat with her teammate, and Anderson is a Senior Mechanical Engineer at the California EV manufacturer.
With this being said, Rivian’s ties with the Rebelle Rally run much deeper than you might think. The automaker started running in the competition back in 2020 when journalist Emme Hall drove a pre-production R1T for the first time.
This year, no fewer than four Rivian R1Ts entered the competition, with three of them backed by the Irvine-based EV maker, while a fourth was entered by a pair of customers – the first time a privately-owned EV ran the Rebelle Rally.
The customer team, made up of Mandy Brezina and Alex Gilman, finished in 11th place, while the other Rivian-backed teams ended the rally in 20th and 30th place respectively, out of a total of 55 entries in the 4×4 class.
The Rebelle Rally was created in 2015 as a women-only competition that allowed drivers to take their vehicles into the wild in an organized event where GPS and other digital navigation tools are off the table. Instead, drivers and navigators have to rely on compasses, paper maps, and plotters to go through the course. It’s no small feat in any truck or SUV — and certainly even tougher in an EV, given the lack of Electrify America stations out in the desert.